I'd already settled on keeping her looking quite sexy, with a fantasy-styled armour set and magical weaponry. I then started to think about how I could convey her darker side. Referring to the earlier development sketches, I thought again about giving her some deformations. At the same time as this, I was also thinking about what the illustration might portray; I had found a nice reference photo of a sitting pose that I could sketch from, with slight adjustments to the posture to make it more interesting, so I started scribbling away.
After a while of trying to figure out what I could do to make the pose my own, I had the illustration's story building in my mind: she's a strong, fearless warrior mage who's just beaten a challenger. Being a cold-hearted, ruthless killer, she's torn the man's head from his shoulders and now holds it out for the viewer to see, daring them to think of challenging her.
I guessed that this might get the point across about her being a darker style of character, so began to play around with a few more ideas; maybe the hand holding the head was in some way deformed, like a demonic hand, granting her super-strength. It seemed too close an idea to the likes of Witchblade, but I liked it nonetheless. Also, for illustration purposes, given the pose and how the hand wouldn't be entirely visible, to hint at it's alternative state might make a nice visual point.
I rode with that idea and altered the position of her left hand, adding to it a sword that I planned to make look fairly bad-ass later on.
I took a day out from the sketch and returned to it to find a few mistakes in need of correction - mostly with the head area. Other than that, the anatomy seemed solid enough.
I used to be quite bad for not taking to the time to fix all mistakes that I spotted - I would just move on and try to wrestle a piece of work into submission. I don't work that way anymore, I take time out at each stage of a project and fix any mistakes as they appear to me. I also seek feedback from peers as often as possible, just to double-check (peer groups that I use regularly are on Facebook, but from having used the Behance WIP feature so often this term, I'll be seeking feedback from class peers too).
I hadn't thought too much about the overall composition of the illustration up until this point - something that would come back to haunt me - but knew that I wanted her to be situated on the left side of the illustration, pointing to the right. For this reason, the original flow of her hair had been heading in the wrong direction, so that was adjusted. While I was doing so, I referred to my earlier hairstyle sketches, playing around with several variations of the long, side-hanging fringe, to see if I could make it work in my favour.
There were a lot of scribbles and discarded sketches for this stage but upon reaching this point, I was pretty happy with my choices so decided to move on.
This is probably my favourite stage of character illustration - dressing them up and getting everything in the right place. It can be very time-consuming, especially as my OCD kicks in and I have to get all the clothing in the right places, and following the correct curvature etc.
Since I hadn't fully decided on the girl's outfit, I had room to play around a little. I feel like this was a double-edged sword; on the one hand, I had plenty of sketches and ideas to refer to, so a good portion of it was practically figured out already; on the other, I would be filling in the blanks with features that would benefit the composition of the illustration, but might not necessarily work in an actual design sense. I decided to wing it and see what happened.
The torso armour design came straight from my earlier sketches - albeit with slight alterations - while the leg pieces and belt area took quite a few revisions to get the way I wanted them. Plenty of sketching, erasing and re-sketching went into this before I eventually had designs that worked for me. I used as little reference as possible for this, relying on visual memory for 90% of the process.
Once I was happy, I knuckled down and got stuck into the linework. I'm always striving to evolve my skills in lineart, so I take my time to get lineweights and tapers just right, and try to produce smooth lines wherever possible.
I was happy with the end result, so worked on the sword a little (the whole time I'd been working on lineart I'd been thinking about how it might look) and luckily, got a solid Bastard sword design in just a couple of tries. I inked it up and called this stage done for the meantime, posting it online to seek feedback.
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